Operational truth

Distributed state is only useful when its age and source are visible. Scout keeps several facts separate so an old healthy report cannot masquerade as a current healthy system.

Read the labels literally

• Connected means the relevant parent or management path is currently observed as online.
• Unavailable means the system could not obtain the Branch or Router evidence required for the requested operation.
• Stale means Scout has an observation, but it is too old to present as current.
• Local only means a child-side change exists while parent visibility is absent from current evidence.
• Changed locally means the parent received a fresh summary showing that the child’s active configuration changed.
• Applied, Failed, and Rolled back describe deployment outcomes; they are not interchangeable with reachability.

Observation time matters just as much as the chip. Branch and Router views show when the router-profile agent was last seen, whether the singular Branch Router is running, the active configuration identity, the last deployment outcome, and the certificate-expiry evidence available to the selected Branch.

When a status surprises you

Check the timestamp, selected Branch, router-profile agent reachability, and Router process state before retrying an action. Retrying cannot make stale evidence current.

The UI correlates expected and observed Branch topology and keeps each source’s freshness visible. Scout exposes bounded current diagnostics; it does not claim to be a general metrics, retention, or packet-capture system.